The Interactive Advertising Bureau has a new President and CEO - and it's the former President and CEO Randall Rothenberg. Who knew a few months ago that when he left to become Chief Digital Officer at Time, he would be back after his boss was canned. Looking at the release and a MediaPost story, there's much positioning that the IAB has tried to not "show up" Time Warner by hiring Rothenberg back. But perhaps the IAB and Rothenberg have done Time Warner a favor as TW tries to turn back the clock - and save some face - on a strategy led by Jack Griffin that will no longer be pursued. Read the release. Read the MediaPost story.

CONTEXTWEB Opens RTB To DSPs

CONTEXTWEB, whose contextual ad exchange product was formerly known ad ADSDAQ, announced that real-time bidding is open for business and two demand-side platforms - MediaMath and [x+1] are already signed up. With CONTEXTWEB's self-service, publisher platform, it's conceivable that unduplicated inventory in the "Long Tail" could be attractive to buyers. Read more.

The Brand-Side Platform - The BSP!

Forbes announced what it's calling a "Brand-Side Platform." According to the release, "Through highly defined Forbes Audience Segmentation Targets (FAST) and a Forbes Media Network (FMN) of editorially vetted publishers and channels, the platform expands the opportunity for advertisers to engage with the highly sought after Forbes reader." Read the release. And, on MinOnline.

Cadreon Founder Goes Start-Up

Former Cadreon exec and founder Keith Pieper recently left the agency trading desk to found a new startup called Pretarget. The company appears to be a search retargeting play which "focuses on prospecting with keywords for display ad buyers, enabling them to 'pretarget' users who have searched a given keyword but not yet visited the advertiser’s site." Pieper's company's roots are still firmly in the agency world as IPG's Velociter - led by Tim Hanlon - is an investor. Read the release.

Ad Networks Forever

A new ValueClick Media survey contends that in spite of all the demand-side platform hype, ad networks are still getting plenty of spend. From the release: "When [advertisers were] asked how budgets for ad networks will change in 2011 compared to last year, 25% of advertisers said they plan toincrease their budgets while 47% will stay the same." Read more.

Sponsoring Stories, Data

It may be called "Sponsored Stories" but one of Facebook's latest advertising product is as data-driven as any other available through the Facebook platform. And now there's a helpful "Help" page on Facebook which tells you all about it. See it.

You May Not Want My Opinion But...

Upstream Group's Doug Weaver has a few ideas on what the recent firing of Time Inc. CEO Jack Griffin means. Weaver writes, "Nobody at Time Inc. is asking my opinion, but exercising the nuclear option on Griffin’s reign sends an unmistakable signal to the media and financial world. Right or wrong, the interpretation will be that the company will only tolerate change at a manageable, incremental pace." Get more opinion.

Skip To My Video Lou

Ken Liebeskind reviews recent results of Google/YouTube's TruView video ads in ClickZ. He writes, "Viewers can close the ads after five seconds to resume their chosen YouTube video. Advertisers only pay when users watch their ad for 30 seconds, or through to completion." Read more about the success metrics.

iAd Half Price Sale?

Well, not quite. But, it's no longer going to cost you $1 million to get in the iAd game as All Things D's John Paczkowski writes, "Apple confirms that the new entry point is $500,000, a significantly smaller commitment, particularly for smaller brands and agencies that are creating and producing their own iAds." Read more.

The Tripod Of Innovation

SpinBack co-founder Dan Reich ruminates on the power of Facebook and innovation on his personal blog: "I think the next wave of innovation (on the consumer side of things) will be about taking timeless human events (like buying things) and overlaying a precise data set and pure social connectivity layer (e.g. Facebeook). Because in each one of these social events, there are very different use cases, with a very different way of using and looking at the data." Read it.

Monsters Of Display Arbitrage

Jay Weintraub of LeadsCon fame posts on his personal blog and sees RIMM following the path of AOL potentially. That's not good. He begins, "I had lunch the other day with one of the earliest innovators and monsters of display arbitrage. They didn't know it, but their work fundamentally altered my knowledge of how people make money online. Their work also inspired TheUseful, and by inspire, we really mean..." Read more!

Data Nugget

"Marketers invested a total $47.6 billion in digital advertising and marketing in 2010 according to the recently released Jack Myers Media Business Report...." How much did you get? Read more.